Note: the following is an earlier draft of an article that just appeared at Autostraddle; the draft below focuses slightly more on a Toronto perspective, while the final draft at Autostraddle gives a more complete analysis (I’ll recommend the Autostraddle version for most readers).

Word has quickly spread on the web in the last couple of days that Rachel Ivey, a member of the Deep Green Resistance environmentalist movement that holds openly transphobic views as “core” principles, is putting together a tour consisting of a few relatively high profile speaking events in June and July. This speaking tour supposedly includes events at City College of NYC as well as the University of Toronto.

You can see the webpage for Rachel Ivey’s online fundraiser for her speaking tour here, along with several planned dates and speaking venues. This includes her planned July 4 speaking engagement at the University of Toronto. The page also mentions that further events will be listed in Ontario.

From there, I’m guessing that it’s not a coincidence that this date occurs right before the radical feminist RadFem Rise Up conference, which is scheduled for Toronto on July 5-7. My guess is that Ms. Ivey will be be speaking at the conference as well.

One point however is that the venue for the ‘Rise Up’ conference is being kept secret, at least for now. That is clearly because anti-trans radfem activists have found it increasingly difficult in recent years to find institutions and organizations that are willing to host them and promote their views on account of their bigoted views regarding trans individuals.

Indeed, one of Ms. Ivey’s scheduled speaking events on her fundraiser page has already been cancelled by Bluestockings Bookstore, the venue that had been scheduled to host her second speaking event in NYC. Bluestockings cited DGR’s “blatantly transphobic rhetoric” as the reason for the cancellation.

As a trans woman who has strong ties to Toronto, however, I will say that I don’t necessarily think that calling for these events to be canceled is the best course of action. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not calling for meaningless ‘dialogue’ with someone who quite openly (and proudly) expresses transphobia as some ‘radical’ principle, but what I am talking about is what is the most effective response. And I tend to consider that question not only from a trans perspective but also as a feminist. It could be that going to the event and challenging the speaker’s views in front of an audience would be a better way to go.

In that scenario, it’s not about changing the speaker’s mind, but it’s about providing a counterpoint for those that might be undecided in the audience.

If anyone has the time or patience to listen, there is a video that DGR produced in which Rachel Ivey details her sentiments that she rejects trans people’s identities, that she rejects trans people’s struggles against coercive gender norms, and that she refuses to acknowledge that cis privilege exists. She states that she is unwilling to listen to contrary views on these issues. The arguments that she makes in the video are based on standard anti-trans strains of radical feminist ideology. The statements she makes are not that sophisticated, and while all of these issues around gender contain subtleties, I think someone who is reasonably educated on trans issues could hear her out and easily challenge her during a Q&A session.

For example, she claims that cis privilege does not exist on the basis that, as she was assigned female at birth, she has faced gendered oppression as a woman her entire life. Of course, that’s true that she has faced gendered oppression her entire life living as a woman in a patriarchal society, it’s just that acknowledging cis privilege is largely a separate issue from the start.

Obviously, for me as a white trans woman to acknowledge that I have white privilege does nothing to obscure the oppression that I have faced as a woman, such as street harassment, or the oppressions that I have faced specifically as a trans woman (e.g. street harassment taking the form of an outright death threat). And, after all, trans women are a tiny fraction of the overall population who are extremely vulnerable to gendered and sexual violence.

Further, acknowledging that gendered oppression takes on specific dynamics for trans women does not erase the gendered oppression that cis women face. More generally, acknowledging that patriarchy’s assigned binary gender roles are coercive and damaging to many trans people does nothing to erase the fact that one of those gender roles is widely privileged over the other.

Ms. Ivey also makes a lot of frankly bizarre-sounding analogies between race and gender, and she also quotes her DGR colleague Lierre Keith making similar statements. Of course such analogies are useful in certain circumstances, but when taken too far they tend to quickly get stuck in problematic terrain.

It’s also worth pointing out that around the [13:35 min] mark in her video, Ms. Ivey claims “I do want to be really clear here that I don’t really care how somebody dresses. I don’t really care how they cut their hair or whether they wear make-up. Personally, I don’t really… it doesn’t really affect me, I don’t really think it’s political.” (She goes on to say she has a problem when such is postulated as an act of political resistance, which in all fairness probably is a bit overdone).

However, she later reads a quote from Lierre Keith as follows:

“…how about this. I am really Native American. How do I know? I’ve always felt a special connection to animals, and started building tee pees in the backyard as soon as I was old enough. I insisted on wearing moccasins to school even though the other kids made fun of me and my parents punished me for it. I read everything I could on native people, started going to pow wows and sweat lodges as soon as I was old enough, and I knew that was the real me. And if you bio-Indians don’t accept us trans-Indians, then you are just as genocidal and oppressive as the Europeans.”

Ms. Ivey proceeds to supplement this with similar analogies, claiming that being a trans woman has equal validity as being “trans black,” stating that one would then supposedly wear clothing associated with African American cultures.

Okay, first of all it must be acknowledged that the sentiment expressed in these comments clearly contradicts the previous statement that Ms. Ivey doesn’t care what somebody wears. If a white person with no meaningful connection to Native American culture wearing moccasins (clearly inappropriate) is analogous to someone born with a penis wearing woman-typical clothing, then that clearly insinuates that that behavior should be considered inappropriate. So I think Ms. Ivey is being at best a bit disingenuous here.

Of course the reality is that these things are not analogous because cultural specificities have to do with a group of people forming, over time, a local context and traditions. There is innumerable evidence that undermining such cultural specificities (through colonization, globalization, etc.) leads to mass-scale human suffering, and is in fact virtually always a component of genocide.

Neither woman-typical nor man-typical clothing resides in the same realm as such local cultural specificities. A person with a penis wearing woman-typical clothing does nothing to undermine “woman culture” nor vice-versa. For example, when women began wearing trousers more commonly in the latter half of the 20th century, they did not do so as a result of male cultural coercion or colonization. Instead they did it out of a component of liberation: it’s called, given your local context, wear whatever the hell you want. Likewise, if men in North America began wearing skirts en masse in the near future, this would not represent a colonization of “woman culture.” In fact, it’s difficult to believe that such a shift would even be all that important.

In fact, if we carry the analogy to completion, we find that the analogy is actually not even consistent with the internal logic of the anti-trans elements of radfem ideology. Because the argument that is virtually always given is that for someone born with a penis to wear a skirt is problematic because it supposedly reifies patriarchal gender norms. (This claim is not true, but we’ll get back to that point in just a moment.)

However, if some ignorant white person were to go around wearing a traditional Native headdress, no one (not even transphobic radfems!) would condemn their actions on the basis that by dressing in such a manner they were supposedly “reifying problematic cultural norms.” Such a claim would probably be just as offensive as the original cultural appropriation itself.

Regarding the claim itself (that trans people wearing clothes they feel most comfortable with supposedly reifies patriarchal gender norms), I would simply ask that the people who profess this idea please offer some concrete, non-ideological verification of this claim. Seriously, what does this even mean? Do these particular radical feminists believe, for example, that when an ordinance is passed providing people with social protections based on gender identity and gender expression, that young girls in the affected area are more likely to be coerced into traditional female social roles as a result of this? When trans people are accepted in society, does it become suddenly more difficult to step outside the boundaries of the traditional gender binary roles?

I’ve heard this claim about reifying patriarchy over and over ad nauseum in various articles from a radical feminist perspective, but I’ve never once heard even a single example of how accepting trans people’s identities supposedly resulted in narrower gender roles for others.

It’s when I hear these claims repeated over and over without any evidence that I suspect that many of these arguments, when it comes down to it, have less to do with the professed ideology, and more to do with the fact that trans lives and trans identities simply offend that individual’s sensibilities.

Moving on, around the [29:13] mark, Ms. Ivey states her belief that trans women who might have some form of male privilege earlier in life, carry that privilege with them no matter what for the rest of their lives. This is a point where Ms. Ivey’s statements cross from ideological nonsense into deeply offensive and damaging. Now I do not deny for a moment that I myself did in many ways have access to male privilege growing up; I was encouraged in school particularly and that probably played a role in my endeavors in science.

However, these days when I’m walking home at night and I get abuse and sexual innuendo hurled at me by strange men, having it ring in my ears that I supposedly have access to male privilege to just snap my fingers and escape that moment is cruelly ironic. I don’t have access to male privilege on the streets. I don’t have access to male privilege in the workplace, where I have previously faced harassment. I do have a history of male privilege and I would never deny that, but attempting to erase my very real present from that picture does nothing to benefit any of us involved in this conversation.

I think this gets at one of the main problems that this type of ideology feeds: somehow anti-trans radical feminists seem to be incapable of acknowledging the violence and discrimination that trans people, and particularly trans women of color, face on a constant basis. I think it’s very difficult to have a productive discussion on those terms, because honestly it feels like my humanity is being questioned when simply acknowledging my very real history of oppression is somehow equated with solidifying patriarchy’s grasp.

And you know, in a patriarchal world, the fact that it is most certainly trans women who face much of the blunt oppression in the trans community is not exactly a random coincidence. Rather than denying trans women’s struggles, one would think that this fact would be a point for women to come together and push back against the oppression facing all women, cis and trans alike.

However, to make a blunt statement, at a certain point I have to think that Ivey’s claim that she and her colleagues are working to eliminate gender from society entirely is not all that serious in the first place. After all, despite the fact that she repeatedly dismisses Judith Butler’s gender theories as “liberal feminism,” I can’t help but notice that she herself perfectly well fits within Butler’s concept of gender performativity: Rachel Ivey is immediately recognizable as a woman according to her gender presentation and mannerisms.

And what exactly are Ivey and the rest of DGR doing to supposedly eliminate gender from society? I notice immediately, for example, that these individuals use gendered pronouns pretty much in the manner that the rest of society does. The use of gendered pronouns of course play a role in socialization from the earliest stages of human development. If Ms. Ivey and the rest of DGR really seek to dismantle the concept of gender entirely (or at least lessen its imprint on society), why don’t they at least take the simplest imaginable step by eliminating gender pronouns in their language?

Of course, I doubt DGR would ever take such a simple step, because it’s always much easier selectively criticizing the gender expressions of a tiny portion of the population, just as much of patriarchal society already does.

One is almost tempted to question if they even authentically believe their own ideology.

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21 comments

The sorts of radical feminist arguments all have such completely faulty underlying premises: that there are two distinct and immutable “biological sexes”; that there is no such thing as “gender” other than one of two biological sexes; that the presence of a particular genital configuration is the basis for the oppression under patriarchy; that the same genital configuration always and forever dictates the experiences one has and the perceptions of others in society.

They believe that trans womyn who don’t pass for cis have more privilege that trans womyn who do. While there can be confounding issues, such as intersex status, and the different issues which earlier and later transitioners may face, on the whole…

…it’s a testable implication of the it’s-all-penis-privilege theory, and it’s completely false.

Thanks for writing this. I had been following DGR for a while before this whole thing blew up in their faces. It led me down a rabbit hole of reading dozens of blogs from these so called “radical feminists” dedicated to nothing but degrading and hating on trans-folk. I had no idea this even existed (chalk that one up to white male privilege?). It’s left me angry and sad that anyone who would claim to know anything about oppression could go on to be so vile and oppressive about another group of human beings.

Anyway, thanks again for making such a well written counter argument, and the fact that you don’t think that Ms. Ivey’s events should necessarily be cancelled makes you a better person than me.

How can they possibly believe any transwoman has any kind of ‘male privilege’, a transwoman by definition distances themselves from male indicators. In fact transwomen risk more than genetic females do in society during transition, and even after transition they can’t ‘replace’ the typically male large feet, hands, general build… transwomen statistically are at more risk than just about any other demographic group.

trans women are certainly impacted with a lot of additional vulnerabilities, but many of us did have at least some measure of male privilege before transition. Let’s try to take a balanced perspective on these issues.

I saw the video as well and immediately noticed Rachel’s very feminine manner of dress. She says during the video that she does not think it very important what someone wears. Personally, I think her choice of dress signifies that not every aspect of feminine socialisation is negative or oppressive, otherwise she would not wear female-exclusive clothing. However, if you look at other members of Lierre Keith’s rad-fem clique (like Cathy Brennan), many of them present as rather masculine although not quite male-looking.

So, you actually believe that you can stop radical feminists from organizing? You honestly believe that you have the power to change our politics, to erase us from the earth, the power to decide for us where and when and with whom we will meet? Oh, think again, you deluded nut case. No matter what you do, no matter how violent you are, we will always prevail. You don’t know what a woman is, or you wouldn’t bother trying to control us. You will never, never stop the tide that is running against you and the lie that is “gender.”
Good luck, though, I’m glad it gives you someone to hate on. Seems you need that to survive.

And regarding the “lie that is gender”– this is utter bullshit. Radical feminists have no desire to “eliminate gender” whatsoever. On the contrary, they merely wish to eliminate gender with which they disagree. And yes, I recognize that that includes me and all other trans women.

And for the zillionth time- it isn’t “violent” for me to disagree with you. If you insist on making personal attacks on myself and other trans women, as well as sex working women (both cis and trans), etc., then we have every justification to respond by asking that the venue refuse to host your conference.